Red Orchestra: Ostfront 41-45

A post on the Red Orchestra blog announces Rising Storm as the first expansion pack for Red Orchestra 2. It'll ferry Red Orchestra 2's bloody, muddy realism out to the sunny, sandy beaches of the Pacific theatre, where American forces will battle the Japanese army on famous battlefields like Tarawa, Kwajalein, Saipan, Iwo Jima and Peleliu.

The expansion is a total conversion created with help from Red Orchestra's active modding community. Tripwire recruited a "hit-list" of modders who had worked with Tripwire before, and asked them to help produce the expansion.

"As Red Orchestra: Ostfront had such an avid modding community, producing some pretty good content, it made sense for the Tripwire team, the core of whom were ex-modders themselves, to offer this opportunity to a team of modders," Rising Storm producer Tony Gillham tells Gamespy.

The US and Japanese factions will be asymmetrically equipped. Gilham tells Gamespy that balancing the well-equipped US forces against a Japanese army that hardly used automatic weapons at the time is the biggest design challenge for the team at the moment, but they're hoping that carefully constructed maps can help to even out each battle. The expansion's due to arrive at an unspecified point this year, and IGN have the announcement trailer, which you can see below.

Red Orchestra 2: Heroes of Stalingrad, the leading tactical multiplayer WWII shooter on the PC, will take the award winning Red Orchestra franchise into the next generation of gaming. Cutting edge graphics and audio built using the Unreal Engine 3, inventive features and streamlined realism will deliver an unrivaled tactical shooter experience.

Like so many tinkering, well-armed elves in a war factory, Tripwire Interactive is putting the final touches on its 64-player, WWII multiplayer FPS, Red Orchestra 2: Heroes of Stalingrad. Today, they've passed along the final system specs for the game, along with the retail box art.

Nothing unexpected, right? Having played Red Orchestra 2 on at least three different hardware configurations over the past month, I can't say that I've had any framerate issues on the systems I've used.

Red Orchestra 2: Heroes of Stalingrad – first it had a name, then it had some screenshots, then it had some videos and now it has a release date. And so the cosmic ballet continues. Tripwire’s next commercial take on the masterfully dour World War 2 mod-gone-pro has been in the offing for a good few years, but now? Now it’s only months away. To war, gentlemen. Well, nearly.(more…)

You know Red Orchestra, the supremely bleak multiplayer FPS set on the Eastern front of WW2? Darkest Hour is a similarly dark and moody mod for it which hefts out RO’s black, oily heart and transplants it into the Western Front. As well as adding new maps, new weapons and vehicles, its features include “Airborne drops… bullet suppression and supersonic cracks”. The horror.

This weekend Darkest Hour hit version 5.0, adding even more maps, vehicles and weapons (including mortars and mortar teams), as well as plenty of uplifting new features like “Players now drop their weapon when they suffer falling damage,” “Players now fall over when shot in the legs,” and “Players can catch fire from nearby exploding vehicles and world fires”. THE HORROR. Trailer and mammoth changelog after the jump.(more…)

The Darkest Hour mod brings the Western Front of World War 2 to Red Orchestra. The huge new 5.0 update adds new vehicles and maps that will let players fight through the most famous battles of Operation Market Garden, including the fight for Carentan and Hill 400. Read on for a list of the new features.

For full details on the update, head over to the Darkest Hour site. The mod is completely free to anyone who owns Red Orchestra, and can be downloaded now through Steam. Here's a summary of the new maps and vehicles.

A quick note for those joining the classic RO Mod 3.3 for UT2004 game event today. The installer was designed before UT2004 was on Steam. So when you install it, first off you should put it here:

<Steam Install Dir>\Steam\steamapps\common\unreal tournament 2004\

Make sure that you don't have "UT2004" appended on the end of the install directory, as this will be the default behavior of the installer.

To launch the mod with the Steam version, you need to modify the launch options for UT2004.To do this follow these steps:

1) Under "Library" find Unreal Tournament 2004 in the list and right click on it. 2) Select "Properties" from the list that appears3) Select "Set Launch Options" from the menu that appears4) Add the following to the box that appears:-mod=RedOrchestra5) Close the window6) Then launch UT2004 from within Steam and the Red Orchestra mod should launch

Additionally, if you use triple buffering you will get some wierd jittering online unless you turn VSync on. You can do this in the RedOrchestra.ini file which is located in

Tripwire Interactive are very proud to announce that Red Orchestra: Combined Arms, the mod version of Red Orchestra that was released in

2003/2004 for Unreal Tournament 2003/2004 has been inducted into The Mod Hall of Fame. The Mod Hall of Fame is a new web site by Mod DB that celebrates the best video game modifications ever made. Head on over to the website now to check out the list:

As part of Steam's Holiday sale all Tripwire Games are going to be 50% off until January 2nd 2011. So if you have been waiting for a chance to get your hands on The Ball, Killing Floor, or Red Orchestra: Ostfront 41-45 head on over to the Steam Store now: